


godot's been and gone

by corollary



Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: F/M, Gift Fic, Original Character - Freeform, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-22
Updated: 2010-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 15:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corollary/pseuds/corollary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to defy the silence, but instead cloaks herself in it. She is a Summoner, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	godot's been and gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lotuskasumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotuskasumi/gifts).



She grows up inside the halls of the Bevelle sanctum -- the temple, cloistered in drabness and revered silences. Everything about it bells with muteness: the priests and acolytes; the orphans made by Sin's toxicity, the Summoners. The last one, she understands. If they talk of it, if they stop to think and reflect, what would keep them from turning back? They glide through the temper's inner chambers, eyes drawn upward to a point no one else could see and hands shaking--with reverence, maybe, or apprehension. The others... they sought to follow the example of the Summoner, who could only hear the maudlin dirge of their own hearts.

She hates the silence.

"When I am a Summoner," she tells her father, at eight years of age, "I will scream at every Fayth I find."

\---

Her father is looking more and more tired every week. He is the temple's mortician, managing the books of the dead.

It has been three days since Sin attacked Bevelle's outer quadrant. The children are the most troubling; they are brought in from the boats, their eyes still open.

She is twelve now, a cup of tea held close to her breast as she veers through the temple's halls. "Father, you should drink something. Maybe have a rest."

He brushes off her concerns as he did the week before, and the week before that. Tend the ones who are still alive, he might say, or, go practice your white magic in the library.

She doesn't tell him she has never cast a single cure spell. She wields fire and lightning and the tide instead. It is so when she calls forth the beast and the equine and the goddess, their elements will not be as strangers, but as old friends.

\---

She is in the temple's library, a woman grown, when she hears the news.

The Summoner Braska -- the one who married the Al Bhed -- had asked that disgraced monk from the Outer Sector Defense Force to be his guardian.

Her fingers tighten around the edge of the desk. Even for a Summoner, all weapons have to be left in the outer hall, so she doesn't have her staff -- and even if she did, she doesn't know what she would do. Throw it? Throw something else? She's supposed to be calm, rational, composed. She is a Summoner.

While she wills her breathing back to normal, she does nothing.

She's so good at it, after all.

\---

"You weren't ready," Auron tells her, but all she hears is, _I wasn't ready._

\---

She chooses Mattaya to be her guardian because of his smile. He's Al Bhed, but he dusts his hair and buys a pair of sunglasses so that no one will notice. He's young -- nearly six years younger than she -- but he's quick, be it with a weapon or a joke.

Mostly, she chooses him because he's different.

When he kisses her neck and unbinds her hair, she tells herself that it's okay that she's doing this and yes, she does love him -- he is her guardian, sworn to protect her, so says the code -- and it's not really about the man who should be here but isn't.

\---

"I wouldn't have minded," is what she wants to tell him but doesn't.

"You should have said goodbye," is what she actually says.

He already looks older, she notices. There is a scar below his jawline that wasn't there before, and deep lines underneath his eyes. He probably hasn't been sleeping. That is the sort of thing he would do; put his own well-being behind the need of his latest mounted idol.

"I didn't intend it to be a goodbye," he says.

It's a pretty lie, but that's all it is.

\---

In Kilika, they dance with fire.

It's a well-rehearsed spectacle, complete with a man who can swallow flame and then breathe in back out. The children run barefoot through the docks underneath the warm night's watchful eye, and she spreads her hands and whispers a name. _Ifrit._

The sky catches aflame, spreading shadows over the ground and illuminating the night.

The townsfolk cheer for her.

She is to be their salvation, after all. Assuming, of course -- this is their jest, because having one Summoner in the field is grave, but having two is a lark -- she wins the race against Lord Braska.

"I want to lose," she says that night, Mattaya's sleeping form pressed against her.

\---

When they return to Bevelle -- the place she had called home, once -- there is nothing there for her.

Her memories pull against her, unwelcoming tidings of a past she didn't want to acknowledge.

"This was where I became a Summoner," she tells Mattaya, who is shivering inside the temple's dank sanctum. He has never felt fully at ease in Bevelle, and she wishes she felt worse about bringing him here. She touches the walls, momentarily silent and reverential.

It's worse outside, when the autumn grass crunches underneath her boots. It had been day like this one, how many months ago, when Auron had first pressed his lips against the knuckles of her hand (once, then twice) and murmured her name.

\---

They are untidy and at odds within her.

Ifrit, the beast. Fire enough to melt a stone.

Shiva, the goddess. Ice enough to stop a storm.

Ixion, the equine. Power enough to sunder a man.

Valefor, the aviary. Wind enough to end a sound.

Bahamut, the wall. Strength enough to hold back time.

The elements are all accounted for, but there's still something missing. At first, she tries to find it in Mattaya's smile -- it's a beautiful smile, but it's the wrong one. Later, she tries to find it in the road ahead of her; the Summoner's path, the end of the line. Thinking of the end only makes them louder. Eventually, she takes to carrying a flask with her, hidden underneath her robes.

Auron's favourite drink had always been White Ice, which she thought had tasted too much like a Cure spell.

Standing over the cliffs of the Calm Lands, with only the unending blackness of the chasm staring back at her, she sips it and understands.

\---

They are spread on discarded robes, hers and his. He is sound asleep, well worn out, and she presses her lips against his shoulder, briefly. How odd that they'd find each other in here, of all places, both parties seeking refuge from the storm.

It never even occurs to her that Mattaya is alone on a palet in one of Remiem temple's many sanctums.

\---

She is gone by the morning's first light, because she can't stand to be the one to watch him leave again.

\---

Even in death, they are pulled by familiarity; to each other, to the future.

"Help my Summoner," he says. It doesn't need to be a question, not now. "Help Yuna."

She arches a brow, but there's a smile there too. "Why should I?" she wonders aloud, only half in jest.

"Because," Auron says, "It won't be silent."


End file.
